Theo Pavlakou

About me

I like asking questions and learning as much as I can about as many topics as possible. I'm slightly more inclined towards science, engineering and economics, but I also love learning about fields that I haven't invested in heavily.

Professionally

I currently work as a software engineer at Meta on the AB Testing Core Platform team in London.

Before that I spent 8 years as a software engineer in Google Lens (since its inception). There I had the opportunity to work on the quality of the product (algorithms for retrieval, ranking, etc.) and also on our offline eval infrastructure.

Prior to that I did a Masters by Research in the Informatics Department of the University of Edinburgh. The title of my thesis was Large Scale Optimisation Algorithms for Machine Learning. This was supervised by Dr. Peter Richtarik. I then went on to pursue a PhD there under the supervision of Dr. Iain Murray. I worked on unsupervised learning problems in Machine Learning and my particular area of research was in Density Estimation.

Personally

I have a wonderful wife and three amazing young kids, who keep me busy when I'm not working.

I'm also a practicing Christian and try my best to understand how to apply timeless principles from the Bible to the world we live in today.